I’m someone who likes to tinker with games/computers whenever possible, and I recently got down to further exploring the BIONICLE Heroes files. There are a great amount of logs/developer comments and the like, but yesterday I loaded up something really cool - An entire unused level!
So, I’ve a few things to say about this quickly. First off, I’m sorry for the lack of editing/commentary/text in the video. I’m a busy college student with not enough time for that at the moment. Secondly, ignore objects popping in and out of existence on the sides of the screen, that’s the result of me using the widescreen hack instead of the game’s native widescreen functions.
And now for the level itself! First off, sound effects don’t load here for some odd reason. The music is the main theme for the game. I feel like the level textures here look better than the ones used in the actual game (at least in the PS2 version, I’m mostly unfamiliar with the GCN version, like I’m using here). The lighting on the Toa looks a bit off at times. The destructible objects only appear here, and are kind of glitchy. There is a really buggy spotlight that can be destroyed. Anything behind the light fades out of existence! As far as I can recall, none of these objects appear in the final version of the game.
There are a lot of areas I cannot reach, where I believe enemies would spawn in the main room. There are also overhead paths later in the level, which I believe you should have been able to reach eventually. The sky lighting makes the Toa fade out of existence. Later in the level are strange textureless boxes that resemble boxes in the final game. They are not solid, and can be walked through. You often have to fall down into areas that prohibit you from backtracking. I don’t recall how frequent that was in the actual game.
Near the end of the level, there is a passage too narrow for you to enter. Enemies appear on the radar beyond that, but I cannot reach them. I also assume that this passage leads to the overhead bridges from before.
If there is enough interest, I will continue to look into this game. There are about 12 test levels, most of which crash when you try to load them. One I should be able to get working is an earlier version of Thok’s Mountain. Additionally, there are a few unused enemies. One is just for testing, and at least three seem to be Matoran (Green, Blue, and Red) (they appear as files separate from the shop keeper/Balta, and have death animations, either implying they were enemies to me). Also, I may be reading this wrong, but maybe at one point in time the Piraka were to have upgradable weapons?
The game calls this a test level, but as far as I can tell, it’s not testing any of the ingame functions (like every other test level I’ve seen in games).
I have been looking at the GCN version. I also have the PS2 version laying around, and will look at that sometime (as well as the demo disc for PS2, which actually had an intelligent way of handling the game’s infamous “Hero Mode”). But for now, enjoy this discovery. I wrote this post hastily, so if anything is unclear, feel free to ask me questions!